Library News Blog

Open Access Textbooks & Educational Resources

Open-access textbooks, journals, images, videos, and other resources has been one of the most exciting developments in academic scholarship during the last two decades. In response to the rising costs of academic publishing and higher education, many concerned scholars have decided to publish their work with open copyright licenses. These open access resources are free to everyone without hindrance of subscription fees, licensing terms, logins, contracts, and other barriers. They provide universal access to research and knowledge.

Faculty, below is a compilation of some of the most popular websites for open access textbooks and educational resources. If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate these resources into your course, please let a UI&U Librarian know. We would be happy to help.

The Open Textbook Network (OTN) helps higher education institutions and systems advance the use of open textbooks and practices on their campuses. We maintain the Open Textbook Library, the premiere resource for peer-reviewed academic textbooks. All of our textbooks are free, openly licensed, and complete; their adoption creates a measurable, positive impact on student success. With our members, we move the open education conversation forward on local and national levels. -Website Description

The MERLOT system provides access to curated online learning and support materials and content creation tools, led by an international community of educators, learners and researchers…The MERLOT collection consists of tens of thousands of discipline-specific learning materials, learning exercises, and Content Builder webpages, together with associated comments, and bookmark collections, all intended to enhance the teaching experience of using a learning material. All of these items have been contributed by the MERLOT member community, who have either authored the materials themselves, or who have discovered the materials, found them useful, and wished to share their enthusiasm for the materials with others in the teaching and learning community. -Website Description

* Look for textbooks with CC or Creative Commons licenses and not Custom Licenses.
The College Open Textbooks Collaborative, a collection of twenty-nine educational non-profit and for-profit organizations, affiliated with more than 200 colleges, is focused on driving awareness and adoptions of open textbooks to more than 2000 community and other two-year colleges. This includes providing training for instructors adopting open resources, peer reviews of open textbooks, and mentoring online professional networks that support for authors opening their resources, and other services. -Website Description

TED-Ed is TED’s youth and education initiative. TED-Ed’s mission is to spark and celebrate the ideas of teachers and students around the world. Everything we do supports learning — from producing a growing library of original animated videos , to providing an international platform for teachers to create their own interactive lessons, to helping curious students around the globe bring TED to their schools and gain presentation literacy skills, to celebrating innovative leadership within TED-Ed’s global network of over 250,000 teachers. TED-Ed has grown from an idea worth spreading into an award-winning education platform that serves millions of teachers and students around the world every week. -Website Description

Creative Commons & Public Domain Pictures

Pictures can make a presentation or course come alive. So how can you find pictures that are copyright-safe and freely available? One strategy is to use pictures in the public domain or creative commons. Public domain images are out of copyright and have no restrictions about how they can be used. Creative commons images can be used in accordance with their creative commons license.

While most resources in the UI&U Library are not open access, they are freely available to the UI&U Academic Community. To access library resources, go to the library homepage and enter keywords in OneSearch. Search results can be limited by publication date (last few years), source type (ebooks and books), and availability to “available online (full text)”. Another strategy is to use the publisher limiter to limited to common textbook publishers such as Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, Oxford, Cambridge, Open Textbook Library, and University Presses.